"How cute, a selfy ... Oh shit!"

Yip. I've also been tossed around by the boom and bust cycle. California was highly glutted after the dot-com bust and I tried to move out of state, which was very difficult due to family issues. My legacy tool skills are the only thing that saved me, being that all those web newbies had no pre-web experience.

I suspect that something more programmer-friendly will soon replace the bloated layer-heavy HTML/CSS/Lamp stack et al currently used; and techies will fired en mass. "Remote" GUI standards are ripe for a big factoring event in the industry. Common GUI dev does not have to be rocket science. It's like the days of Windows C++ just before VB and Delphi came along, making GUI's a snap (initially), putting many of them out of work.

Fortunately for them, the Windows market in general was expanding such that there were plenty of projects that needed the speed or control of C++ GUI's still. But the same may not be true of the next Idiom Cleaning event.

It's pretty obvious to me that the real solution is to store passwords in a hardware black-box (with a mirrored spare) that only allows a limited number of tries for a given password and all passwords per time period. E.i. throttled.

Computers are getting to fast to permit them to chomp on raw encrypted files.

An idiot may not know that :-)

If the STEM wages in other countries are almost double relative to the local standard of living, then typically those people would put more effort into it. Capitalism incentives 101.

The threat of being outsourced here also tends to make one treat hands-on technical work as a mere stepping-stone job, hoping to move into management, which pays more relative to heads-down tech work. If it's a temp job, obviously one will tend to put less effort into fine-tuning their skills.

Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion.

And don't hold your breath waiting for them to be listed publicly, either.

If this is over trade secrets, the alleged trade secrets, if legitimate, will still be secret. So unless/until Facebook gets a judgement that the claims are bogus, the proceedings will be under seal.

Even if they ARE bogus it may not be in Facebook's interest to publish them, either. They might be little-known enough that exposing them to their competition might make the competitive environent tougher for Facebook.

So don't be surprised if the "secrets" and the details of the verdict or settlement remain under wraps.

Until systemd is removed from a major Linux distro, I would consider that distro to be less secure than even a Windows system.

Some Poettering apologist will probably mark you as a troll, but for completeness there are a number of distros that default to non-systemd init architectures, including but not limited to

Calculate, Gentoo, Funtoo, Source Mage, Dyson, indeed all kinds of distros either default or support running a systemd-free system.

I thought the main purpose was to help you remember the company, not to produce sales then and there. Nobody really expects to do much "real" business at conventions.

Conventions are a "notion" system and bragging tool: bigger booth = bigger company, to help separate you from little guys. And for a little guy, demonstrate that your company exists and has enough money to at least afford a (small) booth.

What's the alternative term? "Non-virtual human-body-based visual attention-capturing mechanism"? Too long, for one.

vendors' afterparties...around in one of the creepy "party busses" prowling the...

Do you have to put it in such negative terms? That really drains the fun from my visits there ... I mean my friend's visit.

... in the last election the powers of greed tried to elect someone who was neither conservative nor liberal but really a direct representative of the 1%. They spent 3 to 4 times as much money, made people stand in 4 hour lines to vote, maximally gerrymandered every district they could...

While your underlying perception is largely correct, your supporting argiments are not. You need to understand the system more if you want to be convincing,

Of particular note is bringing up gerrymandering. In virtually all the states the electoral college votes are chosen in a statewide, popular-vote, winner-take-all contest. Gerrymandering doesn't affect this at all. (Which is good for the Republicans, as the Democrats have been far more effective at it.)

As for spending: With the support of labor unions and the media empires, the Democrats get massive, uncounted, campaign subsidies, while the Republicans mostly have to pay for their own propaganda directly..

The big exception to that is Fox News: But IMHO they, and the party establishment, are what lost for the Rs the last time around. Fox was blatantly pure Neocon (the faction of Romney, the R establishment, and the 1%ers,) The primaries are where the parties' candidates are chosen. Fox's hilariously biased reporting and the R establishments massive (and often violent) cheating, alienated the supporters of Ron Paul, to the point that they would not support him - virtually to a man - and also alienated many Rs who observed this circus. Romney lost five states by margins smaller than the number of people who voted for Paul in primaries and caucuses. Had they not done this, Romney might still have won the nomination honestly, and received eJ.nough votes to swing those states.

So, yes, their money didn't buy them the election. But IMHO what really lost it was intra-party behavior so corrupt that major factions of the party's voters decided they could not be allowed to have control of the government's levers of power - even if the alternative was an exceptionally effective, avowedly-Communist, Chicago-Machine politician

So we need a meter for meters now.